how can I get started with Caliper?

[daniellopez1]

I just started doing some research on Caliper, and I'd love some pointers.

As with any standard that I've tried so far, the learning curve is steep  the amount of information is overwhelming and sometimes is not easy to digest

Some of the questions I have are:

Will I be able to send events/messages from my tool to Canvas?

How do I use the sensor API in canvas?

Do I need an LTI launch to get the initial actor data? how do I build the actor data otherwise?

does this work with LTI 1.1/1.3?

I found this 

Caliper v1.1 Guide - Table of Contents 

But it really doesn't say much

https://github.com/IMSGlobal/caliper-phpI was taking a look at 

IMS Caliper Analytics Best Practice Guide | IMS Global Learning Consortium 

and found 

GitHub - IMSGlobal/caliper-php: This is a draft implementation of the Caliper Sensor API written in ... 

It says that we have to send a message to the store event like this.

But where/how do I get the apikey, what do I put in the host?

Any insight or resources would be helpful. Thanks!

[pklove]

I don't think you can send events from your tool into Canvas.  I don't  think it has the ability to consume and re-emit events.

[daniellopez1]

So, what's the point of the Caliper analytics?

what's the use case? 

thanks

[peter3]

The use is that all of your tools (canvas and all the LTIs) can emit behavioral data into a common store, so you can have a more complete behavioral profile to analyze. 

Assume that you have Canvas and an LTI tool blended into a course,  you can use canvas data to analyze the behavior of the user up until they launch the LTI tool, then that tool becomes a blackbox, then at some point in the canvas data the user will re-emerge.  Using caliper, both canvas AND the LTI tool can emit behavioral data, so you will be able to view it as a continuous stream  regardless of which vendors system the behavior is actually taking place in.